By
Kenneth R.
Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com |
November 23, 2006
We’re told it’s
the Realists versus the Neo-Cons, and the Realists are winning.
On Monday, less than two full weeks after Democrats won the Congress
on a platform of “phased withdrawal” from Iraq, Iraqi
leaders bowed their heads in submission, announcing that they will
hold direct talks with Iran and Syria in Tehran this weekend.
Right on cue, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group leaked on Tuesday
its recommendation that the United States negotiate directly with
Syria and Iran, to convince them to reduce their assistance to the
terrorists in Iraq.
Also on Tuesday, the Syrians and the Iranians (and their agents in
Lebanon) assassinated yet another pro-Western political leader,
Lebanon’s ministry of industry, Pierre Gemayel.
Pierre Gemayel, the 34-year old scion of one of Lebanon’s most
prominent Maronite Christian families, had joined forces with the
anti-Syrian alliance led by Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated
former prime minister. His uncle, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated by
the Syrians in August 1982, just weeks after he was elected Lebanon’s
president in an earlier élan of Lebanese independence. His
father, Amin, was elected president to replace him.
To the Realist school of American foreign policy, such events are the
sad necessities of life. We can’t keep murderers and thugs from
killing each other. But through cautious diplomacy and the judicious
use of force, we can keep them from killing us.
Nobody, in either school, believes this sequence of events is mere
coincidence. Neo-Cons
such as Michael Ledeen
view these developments as signs of U.S. weakness and drift; a
failure to pursue the terrorists who declared war on us in 1979, when
Iranian “students” (including Iran’s current
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran
and took 54 diplomats and all of America hostage for 444 days.
To the Realists, whose current champions are former National Security
advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, we never should
have ventured into Iraq to depose the regime of Saddam Hussein. As
Scowcroft hectored Condoleeza Rice in a semi-public forum 3 years
ago, “at least with Saddam in power,
we’ve
had fifty years of peace.”
Besides the arithmetic exaggeration (Saddam only assumed full power
in Iraq in 1979), Scowcroft’s argument is not unlike what we
are hearing today from the Baker-Hamilton
commission. Let’s
negotiate with Syria and Iran. After all, these regimes respect
power. They know we can do them tremendous harm. So we have leverage
that we can and should use to achieve our goals. We don’t need
to over-reach by seeking to overthrow them.
America’s goal, in the eyes of the Realists, is to get Syria
and Iran to moderate their support for the insurgents, so we can
prevent a few attacks today and tomorrow. Let’s decrease the
level of violence, so the U.S. can withdraw troops from Iraq without
destabilizing the country.
In exchange for their help in achieving a very temporary goal (which
is certainly in their power, since they are backing the insurgents),
the United States must abandon all support to pro-democracy forces in
Syria and Iran and provide security guaranties to both regimes. That’s
the deal that is currently on the table.
We get political cover for a troop withdrawal, and they tell their
terrorist proxies to lay low for a time and half a time (if we’re
lucky). All we really get is a fig leaf. But smiling as we put it on
is called Realism.
Neo-cons view these events quite differently. They remember that
these very same Realists called on the Iraqi people to rise up
against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in March 1991, and
then we withdrew, allowing Saddam to slaughter his opponents by the
tens of thousands.
Neo-cons understand that Iraqi president Jalal Talabani is not bowing
his head and slouching toward Tehran out of any desire to conclude a
pact with Iran’s Islamofascist leaders. He is going there
because he knows we are about to abandon his country once again.
But Neo-cons also argue that we have never seriously tried to achieve
the policy goals the President has so eloquently laid out in speech
after speech, where he has spoken of his “freedom agenda”
and of breaking fifty years of stability that was based on U.S.
support for regional dictators.
¬Ý
• We have failed to carry out that agenda in Iraq, by
allowing an ill-chosen “Viceroy” to transform liberation
into occupation through his monumental arrogance.
• We have failed to support freedom-fighters in Iran, bowing to
pro-regime lobbyists in the United States and to the siren-songs of
regime envoys, who claim their willingness to cooperate if only we
would treat them with respect;
¬Ý
• We have never even tried to help the pro-democracy forces in
Syria, while abandoning the Lebanese to Hezbollah militiamen and
Syrian thugs.
The Realists argue, we don’t have time to wait for the seeds of
freedom to sprout. Indeed, it may be that they are being sown on
rocky ground and will never grow, at least not in our lifetime.
On the contrary, we don’t have the luxury of accommodating
Islamo-fascist regimes that are hell-bent on acquiring nuclear
weapons, and have no intention of abandoning that quest just because
we kowtow before them.
The Realists are leading us into very dangerous territory. Where have
James Baker and Lee Hamilton taken their cues when it comes to
recommending direct talks with Iran? From Iranian officials and
Iranian regime surrogates, among others.
Baker himself had a three-hour lunch in New York recently with Iran’s
ambassador to the United Nations, while special envoy Frank Wisner
has reportedly been meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s
national Security advisor, Ali Larijani, in Stockholm and other
places to discuss the terms of America’s surrender.
For 27 years, the United States has imposed various forms of
punishment on the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a vain
hope that pain would induce them to change their behavior. Clearly,
it hasn’t worked, because the pain has been too slight.
So now the Realists are telling us that we should abandon those tools
and simply ask politely, and hope for better results.
This is realistic? Even a flaming left-wing Hollywood screenwriter
could go to town with that plot. That is precisely what Neville
Chamberlain did in Munich when he negotiated with a very reasonable
Adolf Hitler in 1938, and returned home to Britain proclaiming “Peace
in our time!”
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile,” Winston
Churchill said famously, “hoping it will eat him last.”
Neo-cons got a boost from an unsuspected quarter earlier this week:
Saudi ambassador to Washington, and long-time head of Saudi
intelligence, Prince Turki bin Faisel bin Abdel-Aziz. Envisaging a
future for Iraq of open civil war, massive ethnic cleansing, and the
military involvement of Iraq’s neighbors, he
told
the Washington Post: “Since
America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.”
The Democrats won Congress on a program of unilateral surrender. And
they are about to reap the spoils as we prepare the terms of our
submission to the Islamofascists in Iran and to the thugs in
Syria.
Unfortunately, the rest of us are going to pay the price of their
folly – and so will countless thousands of freedom-loving
Iraqis, Iranians, and Lebanese, who so foolishly believed in us and
our commitment to freedom.
We have seen the first victims over these past few days. Many more
are about to fall.
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